Tag Archives: Twitter

Individuals inside and outside the organisation now use a range of social tools to engage with the business. So how can CIOs make the most of this online conversation and use unstructured social data to help shape better products and services? Here I present a recent article for silicon.com, where I polled five IT leaders for five top tips:

Tip 1 – Identity the themes and address the customer: John Bates, CTO at Progress Software, says last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico was the first example of a major company such as BP having its reputation damaged through an inadequate response to social media: “They didn’t respond effectively and they got badly hurt,” he says.

Much has been written about the oil giant’s struggle to incorporate social media into its communications crisis plan. Bates says CIOs must help the business identify underlying issues addressed through social media and find a means to deal with customer-identified themes.

“Social media is a series of events and Twitter is the medium that can potentially damage the reputation of governments and businesses. If someone says something about your organisation, you need to raise the issue and understand what the sentiment says about your business,” Bates adds.

“Social is not just about the technology. It’s actually more about the culture. The 21st-century customer understands the culture of social media. Your business has to understand why people would want to go out on to the internet and to collaborate.”

I recently had the opportunity to listen to Innocent Drinks co-founder Richard Reed, who went to great lengths to explain to a select audience why business leaders must recognise how a continual focus on the customer help keeps executives honest.

Reed was speaking at the CIO Connect annual conference that took place in London last week. There was loads of insight from speakers about the best way to deal with the increasing influence of the consumer over business technology, most of which will appear in the autumn edition of CIO Connect magazine.

But Reed had a particularly strong take on engagement. His entire organisation is focused on simple, honest communication with the customer. And when it comes to creating a social media strategy through Twitter, Reed’s advice is simple: “Talk as you would talk to your friends, but without the swearing.”

Rather than confusing customers with acronyms and double-speak, Reed encourages executives to “keep it natural”. Which I think is a pretty concise summary for how businesses should approach all forms of communication.

Here is another of my features for silicon.com, which presents advice from technology leaders on creating successful engagement through social technology:

Social networking has become a key medium for interacting with colleagues, contacts and customers. So why are some businesses still scared to let their employees engage?

As many as 48 per cent of companies still ban their staff from accessing social networks at work, according to research from HCL. The survey suggests many executives believe social tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, are too distracting from day-to-day activities.

That perception can be a challenge for modern CIOs who are charged with moderating communication channels, while ensuring the continual flow of information. Below, leading business executives provide seven tips for creating successful engagement through social technology.

Whether blogging about their area of expertise or tweeting about business best practice, more CIOs are choosing to express their views through collaborative technology. Here’s my latest feature for silicon.com about the use of social media by IT leaders:

More senior IT leaders are beginning to dabble in social media and are finding new ways to help the business. So, where will social CIOs go next? Do IT leaders use social media to attract potential employees and do they use collaborative tools to keep new workers engaged?

Kcom Group started to use social media for recruitment in 2010, establishing a Twitter account for potential openings. Dean Branton, director of customer operations and group CIO at the telecoms specialist, said the organisation’s LinkedIn recruitment pages launched earlier this year and are focused on building a network of contacts.

“We have a full recruiter seat on LinkedIn, which allows us to proactively search for candidates, whose information can be imported into a PDF for hiring managers to review,” Branton said. The group’s Kcom recruitment page also provides links to relevant web sites and testimonials from current employees.

The consumerisation of IT is pushing social media onto the business agenda and blurring links between CIOs and their external lives, according to my latest feature for silicon.com:

JLT Group CIO Ian Cohen is a social media fan who has encouraging words for IT leaders wondering how to straddle the gap between personal and business identities to make the most of online collaboration tools.

“Try it,” Cohen said. “Give it a go, based on the type of things that interest you. The CIO needs to lead the debate on social media for the chief executive, so it makes sense to develop your position.” Finance CIO Cohen is a prolific user of social media, tweeting about business, football and music from his @coe62 account.

He is also a fan of LinkedIn and Facebook, and has taken steps to test enterprise-ready social tools behind the JLT firewall. When it comes to the divide between business and personal life on social media, Cohen suggests the links between work and external lives are blurring at an executive level.

For CIOs, one thing is certain: the increasing interest in social media means IT leaders now have to spend more time with the marketing executive. Here’s my latest feature for silicon.com, which shows that a successful social strategy requires a confluence of CIO and CMO expertise:

From Facebook pages to Twitter profiles, executives round the board table will be expecting someone in the organisation to establish the organisation’s social-media strategy. While social media provides a means for the chief marketing officer (CMO) to engage with potential customers, it is the CIO who will be expected to provide the technical knowledge to make such digital marketing strategies a business reality.

“I spend more time now with the chief commercial officer, who is responsible to marketing, because of the criticality of social media,” said easyJet CIO Trevor Didcock, when asked whether he has spent more time with the marketing department during the past 12 months.

I’ve been on holiday for the past week. Well, I say holiday – I live in London and we visited Leigh-on-Sea for a few hours one day. The main point is that I haven’t been at work. And during that time away from my desk, a piece I wrote on the social CIO for silicon.com was published. The piece suggests that not enough IT chiefs are championing social media and collaboration:

There might be 500 million Facebook users around the globe but that still leaves almost six and a half billion non-users. What lies behind such figures is a broader socio-economic change. The number of people using Facebook has doubled year-on-year and the up-and-coming cadre ofyounger employees expect to use social technologies in the workplace.

Such expectations create significant challenges for the executive team. The CIO, as the individual with responsibility for organisational IT, should be at the apex of that challenge. That, however, is not necessarily the case.

My Twitter feed seems to be a constant trickle of lists, with the latest bunch of social media gurus keen to impart their knowledge on topics like search engine optimisation and social networking. Good for them.

And good for me, as I jump on the top tip bandwagon and ride into the search-optimised sunset. Ladles and gentlespoons, let me unveil my top five types of numbered list stories:

Top 10: The all-time favourite – most top tip lists come in tens and there’s a reason for that; it’s a round number

Top 100: The ultimate list story – particularly good for top album blog entries. And for Channel 4 TV shows compiling clips from the 1980s

Top 5: Half a top ten but not necessarily half as good. Great for your basic, short tip list

Top 6: Also has a nice, round feel. Useful for list compilers that are aiming for ten, but who quickly run out of ideas

Top 9: There’s an honesty about giving a top nine; the complier knows they’ve only got nine points and they’re admitting as much

I recently saw a ‘Top 9′ list story where one respondent complained that the journalist hadn’t bothered to round the list up to ten. That might be so, but at least the journo was honest – the scribe clearly got to nine and ran out of ideas. I mean, it’s not like these list stories take five minutes to put together.

I was on holiday in Norfolk last week. Very nice it was, too. I hung around on the beach with my family and counted crocodiles with my daughter. That second bit was in a zoo, by the way – not on the beach…

Fading in and out of network coverage, I spent most of my time in East Anglia without the information conduits that provide my daily fix of Aston Villa news (the Worldwideinterweb), pointless babble from people I don’t really know that well (Twitter) and pictures of people I once knew doing REALLY CRAZY THINGS, like drinking (Facebook). I’ll be honest; I missed all that online rubbish.

I mean, it’s good to go without stuff you like once in a while. Like having a period without booze, dropping your reliance on email and web stuff can leave you feeling cleansed and healthy. My lovely wife – bored with my continual logging on – used to challenge me to have internet free days (IFDs).

I’ve done a few IFDs. They’re OK, but you spend most of the day thinking about how you can stop yourself from logging on. Which means you’re just as internet-obsessed as usual, only you’re thinking rather than actually doing.

A seven day IFS (internet free stretch) allows you to move beyond thinking/stopping/doing. There’s that first period of twitchiness, but you slowly get used to having no online access. In fact, you start to rely on other conduits; in Norfolk, I bought a newspaper every day and read it cover to cover. And I even used Ceefax on our non-digital TV. Yeah, man – old school.

Anyway, I’m back home now and the first thing I did was turn on the computer. I discovered I’d missed out on absolutely nothing, but it was nice to have ‘new faithful’ back. It’s tragic, I know. But I am a sucker for all that online crap.

Social networking is great. You can use Facebook to see photos of people you lost touch with years ago, celebrating the birthday of someone you don’t actually know. You can use LinkedIn to hype yourself up as the latest, greatest ‘social media guru’. And you can use Twitter to find out that loads of people got up this morning, ate some food, listened to a bit of music, were busy at work, went home, watched TV and went to bed.

But social networking is also a bit odd. I was watching the news on TV earlier and there was a lot of coverage of Peter Harvey, the teacher from Mansfield who has been charged with attempted murder. After I’d finished my fix of retro information gathering (news on the TV), I went all Web 2.0-tastic and did a search for the teacher on Facebook. And there was quite a bit of stuff, some of which surprised me – names, alleged actions, etc. You know, the kind of stuff the retro media aren’t mean to print in case of prejudicing a trial.

But all that stuff is fair game in the world of social networking. Isn’t it?